


feel the fire, touch the water

by flipflop_diva



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Awesome Natasha Romanov, Character Study, Collection: Purimgifts Day 1, Gen, Post-Civil War (Marvel), Red Room (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-02-26
Packaged: 2019-03-24 05:47:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13804719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flipflop_diva/pseuds/flipflop_diva
Summary: She was born in fire, carved in ice, made from air and believed in only the things she could stand on.





	feel the fire, touch the water

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Morvidra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morvidra/gifts).



> Written for Morvidra for the Purim Gift 2018 fest. Happy Purim!

From the moment she was born, the world could see the fire within. A little girl with a shock of flaming red hair. Strong and feisty and fiery, right from the start. Kicking her little legs and screaming as loud as she could. Even then, she was marked. A future superstar, born to be something special.

As she grew, the people in her world taught her to make the most of those traits, to be strong and feisty and fiery. To make those traits an advantage she had over other people. To use them to draw other people in to her, to let those other people think she was safe, to think they were safe when they were with her. Until she burned all the ones who got too close. 

Powerful and dangerous, that’s who she was. A spark the men —and sometimes the women — all thought they could control, until the fire grew too much and it was she who was in control.

Until it was she who had always been in control.

•••

She was raised in the ice. Frozen winters and frozen bodies. Forced to survive without an ounce of heat.

She was raised like the ice, too. They all were. Frozen and hardened until she was cold with sharp edges. But ice can shatter, and so did many of the others. She watched it happen. 

She wasn’t ice, though, despite what her trainers thought. No, she was water. She learned how to survive, to fit herself to what they wanted her to be, always changing, always flowing.

They said that struggle made her stronger. They said that it made her special. They didn’t see that it would be the one thing that would finally let her escape.

•••

Clint always told her she moved like the air. One moment in one place, the next in another. Most of her targets never saw her coming. And even when they did, most of them couldn’t catch her.

She’d learned from the time she was a child to be light on her feet, to be able to practically glide through the air, to never make a sound unless she wanted to be heard. It was a useful skill. She could blend into the shadows, could hide in plain sight, could sneak up on people who thought they were impervious to being snuck up on.

And when she became an Avenger, with the help of Steve and his shield, she was finally able to learn how to fly.

•••

In a team of superheroes, she was always the one with her feet most on the ground. While Steve saw idealism and Tony saw creations, while Bruce looked at the science and Clint looked at the connections, Natasha was the one who saw what things really were. Without emotion and without what she wanted them to be.

She was the logical one, the practical one, the one who understood what needed to be done, even when no one else wanted to do those things. She didn’t hang on to hope and she didn’t hang on to fear. She took things head on and saw them for what they were.

Even when those things meant she was on one side of the battle and her friends were on the other.

•••

But on the day she stood in an airport hangar and fired a blast against everything she thought she knew, she finally saw the truth. She may have been born in fire, carved in ice, made from air and believed in only the things she could stand on, but that was before.

She had changed, and now she was finally more than what they had made her.

**Author's Note:**

> 


End file.
